The Rage: Carrie 2

In Halloween: H20, Jamie Lee Curtis returns to the scene of the horror
20 years later as a school headmistress. In The Rage: Carrie 2, Amy
Irving does the same. Any significance to that? Only that both movies suck, the
difference being that the former tries to be funny and isn't, the latter
doesn't and is.

In keeping with the mini-trend of having dorky teenage girls strike back
(She's All That, Jawbreaker), The Rage features young
Rachel Lang (newcomer Emily Bergl, shining despite the material) as a
trailer-park toughie with a mother in an insane asylum who counters high-school
ostracism by wearing goth duds and making nihilist remarks in English class.
She achieves vindication not through a makeover, however, but through
telekinesis. When her best friend jumps off a building after being dumped by a
gross football player, she seethes with the rage of the title despite falling
for one of the jocks, until the inevitable shitstorm descends, complete with
spearguns.

Director Katt Shea does some tricks with the camera, but the film's fun comes
mostly at the expense of Irving, whose portentous flashbacks to the Brian De
Palma original are howlers; her fate gives new meaning to the expression
tête-à-tête. Stupid but not boring, Carrie 2
demonstrates that some concepts are best left buried.

-- Peter Keough

The Deep End of the Ocean

With the baneful movie cliché of the endangered child as its starting
point, The Deep End of the Ocean has nowhere else to go but up. And so
it does, thanks to Ulu Grossbard's restrained direction, Stephen Schiff's
inspired adaptation of the bestseller (hey, he must have thought, I've tackled
Nabokov in Lolita, why not turn Jacquelyn Mitchard into Proust?), but
mostly thanks to Michelle Pfeiffer, who's unnervingly convincing in the role of
Beth, a frowzy, beleaguered housewife.

She's the one to blame when three-year-old son Ben gets lost in a crowded
Chicago hotel lobby, and despite the efforts of a multicultural task force
embodied by Whoopi Goldberg (whose detective character is black, female, gay,
and mercifully absent for most of the movie) he's not found. Years pass and
Beth takes the loss poorly, retreating into pills and 24-hour naps while other
son Vincent (Jonathan Jackson) grows sullen and sports an earring, daughter
Kerry grows cute, and husband Pat (Treat Williams) opens an Italian restaurant.
Then Ben shows up at their door and things get complicated.

For the most part, the film unfolds these complications -- exultation,
disorientation, guilt, sibling rivalry -- with poignant obliqueness. A gesture,
look, or detail does the job handled in most tearjerkers by a harangue, and at
times Deep End approaches the submarine frontiers of memory and
identity. At other times it seems like a bloodless family-counseling session.
"You're just a concept," Vincent accuses Ben, and often it's true. Despite its
genuine emotional power, Deep End never goes in over its head.

-- Peter Keough

Tango

The latest dance drama from Spanish writer/director Carlos Saura (Flamenco,
Blood Wedding) turns the tango, the terpsichorean equivalent of sex
standing up, into one belabored and boring slow dance. A Best Foreign Language
Film nominee, this plodding meditation on art and artifice follows a filmmaker
named Mario (Miguel Ángel Solá) as he strives to create the
ultimate movie about . . . the tango. Yet the wink-wink
self-reflexivity backfires when Saura, just like Mario, struggles to find a
compelling narrative to justify all the heel hammering. Indeed, though the
dance sequences seethe with feral sensuality, the plot's as slim as a
cigarillo. In between rehearsals, mopy Mario pines for his ex-wife/star
(Cecilia Narova), then, predictably, sidles up to a young dancer (Mia Maestro),
an Audrey Hepburn-esque muchacha with Mafia ties.

As if to offset the dearth of intrigue, the dialogue balloons with risible
pomposity. Take, for example, this morsel of pillow talk: "Imagination is a
guard rail that keeps you from falling into the pit of horror." With missteps
like that, this is one Tango you'd be wise to sit out.

-- Alicia Potter

Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels

The term Tarantino-esque has faded a bit in American Independent filmmaking, as
have the fortunes of its namesake. To judge by the debut film of British
filmmaker Guy Ritchie, that style of moviemaking hasn't died but has found
greener pastures overseas. This is an audacious, frenetic, ultimately pointless
exercise in scams, double-crosses, whimsical violence, and arty human folly.

A get-rich-quick heist, as usual, is the cause of everything. Eddie (Nick
Moran), Bacon (Jason Flemyng), Soap (Dexter Fletcher), and Tom (Jason Statham),
a hunky quartet of wanna-be high-rollers, plot to win big in a poker game with
Hatchett Harry (P.H. Moriarty), a London mobster. The game is fixed, however,
and the aspiring punks find themselves with a few days to repay a gambling debt
of half a million pounds. Their solution is to rob their neighbors, a ruthless
band of drug dealers. Their neighbors also have plans, however, as do Harry and
an assortment of other crusty ne'er-do-wells; and each scheme collides with the
others with the giddy logic of a nuclear chain reaction.

Ritchie orchestrates the plots and anti-plots with the delight of a sadistic
child whose artistic palette brims with cinematic pyrotechnics and movie
allusions. Sometimes his showoff style seems gratuitous. But the performances
-- especially by fierce footballer Vinnie Jones and the late, real-life tough
guy Lenny McLean as two of Hatchett Harry's henchmen -- give the frivolity the
needed flesh and blood. By the end of Lock, Stock, Ritchie's career
shows signs of smoking.

-- Peter Keough

God Said, "Ha!"

Written and directed by former Saturday Night Live cast member Julia
Sweeney, with Quentin Tarantino as executive producer, God Said, "Ha!"
offers no sexually ambiguous Pat, no hit men in suits, only Julia Sweeney alone
on stage telling the story of how her brother was diagnosed with cancer and how
both he and her off-kilter parents moved into her brand new bachelorette
bungalow in LA. Although her shtick is sometimes stagy, Sweeney paints her
quirky family members with warmth and humor. Her father, who wears a walkman at
all hours (even in bed) so he can be up to date with NPR news, tells her of an
earthquake in Japan. "Oh my God," she gasps, "when did it happen?" He answers,
"About 30 seconds ago." When Sweeney too is diagnosed with cancer and has to
undergo a hysterectomy, she starts wondering about cancer of the fat. Would
emergency liposuction be so bad? And at her doctor's suggestion that she find a
sperm donor (as many as six) in case she wants to have children of her own
someday, she does the natural thing: she gets out her address book.

-- Rachel O'Malley

20 Dates

Myles Berkowitz's shoestring mockumentary about dating in Los Angeles is a
tongue-in-cheek charmer whose uproarious, Candid Camera-style moments
elevate it above its meager origins. As a frustrated, recently divorced
filmmaker, Berkowitz plays an unbridled parody of himself. To jump-start his
career and his love life, the would-be auteur decides to make a documentary
chronicling his next 20 dates -- and for the concept, he receives $60,000 from
a financier of dubious motives.

Most of the date-cam scenarios unfold in all-too-perfunctory fashion. The film
is most barbed and effective when Berkowitz is conversing with his
crass-mouthed producer, who wants a T&A picture, or when he's out prowling
the supermarket or an AA meeting, desperately trying to fill his date quota.
Along the way, the romantic klutz falls for one of his candidates and develops
a conflict between his emotions and his desire to complete the project. It's
also at this juncture that the film surrenders its witty edge and falls into to
a preachy eddy of maudlin melodrama. If only Myles had stayed single longer, he
might have completed what promised to be a piquant treat.

-- Tom Meek

Baby Geniuses

According to Tibetan myth, babies know all the universe's secrets.
Unfortunately, they can't communicate this wisdom to adults. But what if we
learned to decipher baby talk? So goes the premise of Baby Geniuses, a
film that plays like a cereal ad (the aren't-precocious-kids-cute kind).
Kathleen Turner is Dr. Elena Kinder, an evil scientist who heads up an
operation that kidnaps babies for research. Her plan goes awry when one
particularly gifted two-year-old escapes from her lab and is switched with his
twin, who lives in the nurturing (and excruciatingly normal) home of Kinder's
niece and nephew. Madcap adventures ensue. Turner, pouring on a double dose of
her trademark haughty breathlessness, slinks through the movie like a lizard
looking for shade.

The target audience of Baby Geniuses is a mystery: the film is too
inane for adults, too advanced for kids. And though the latter may enjoy the
occasional nose picking and crotch kicking, they'll be clueless when the babies
start talking about disposable income and Pavlov's dog. It all amounts to
pabulum.